Recently, as a mobile appliance such as a cellar phone equipped with a camera has been introduced, still images and moving pictures can be taken regardless of time and location.
In addition, for high-resolution and high-quality photographs, the performance of the camera has been gradually improved, and a camera module having an auto-focusing function, a close-up shot function, and an optical zoom-in/zoom-out function has been mounted.
In order to ensure the performance of the mounted camera module, the size of the camera module must be enlarged.
However, if the camera module is enlarged, mounting the camera module on the mobile appliance is difficult when taking into consideration the design of the mobile appliance, and the mobile appliance represents the limitation in performance thereof.
If a liquid-phase curing material is used when the lens for the camera module is fabricated, the lens is fabricated as a wafer-type lens due to the low viscosity of the liquid-phase curing material. However, even though the wafers are aligned at desirable positions thereof when the wafers are stacked, the lenses may be de-centered due to the contraction of the materials. Accordingly, the product yield may be degraded, and the problems related to the modulation of the wafer-type lens may occur.
The de-center phenomenon occurs when the center of one curved surface of a lens is mismatched with the center of the other curved surface of the lens, and the performance of the lens may be degraded due to the de-center phenomenon. In other words, even though the center of the top surface of the lens must be aligned in line with the center of the bottom surface of the lens, when the upper and lower portions of the lens are cured at different speeds in the step of curing the lens by irradiating light or heat in the middle of a molding process for the lens, the upper portion of the lens may be offset from the lower portion of the lens, so that the performance of the lens may be degraded.
Therefore, a method of fabricating a novel lens, capable of achieving the mass production of the lens by using a liquid-phase curing material and reducing and/or preventing the de-center phenomenon, and an apparatus for fabricating the lens have been required.